The transnational character of the Moroccan women's movement provides the framework of Amy Young Evrard's ethnographical study of societal pressures which led to the reform of the state's family law known as the Mudawwana. The reform passed through parliament in 2004, equalizing women's and men's civic rights within state law in matters related to marriage, divorce, and child custody.
Evrard's gateway into Moroccan women's transnational activism consists of two years’ research, conducted mainly in 2002 through 2003 with shorter visits to the field in 2006 and 2008. “Transnational” refers to cross-territorial interactions between ideas, such as norms on equality between women and men; activities, such as women's counseling sessions, lectures on human rights, microcredit cooperative meetings, literacy classes, job training programs, and protest marches; and pressure groups, such as women's associations in rural and central areas, state bureaucracies, international NGOs, funding agencies, and the press. Her methodological approach is that of a participant observer who engages as a women's rights activist while making analytical notes (37).
The study fits well within social movement theories where associations constitute spaces for socialization and mobilization. Activists go through a “process of convincing”, according to Evrard, that involves transforming women “from individual sufferers to collective sufferers who talk about and fight for a common legal and political solution” (53). She perceives the Mudawwana as the nucleus around which women's groups take part in a multidirectional relationship with the monarch, political parties, civil society, and international donor agencies (103). Evrard's book sheds new light on how Moroccan women were mobilized at the individual and collective levels in support of legal reform, examining the reform process through three separate but overlapping frames of analysis labeled “equality,” “women's human rights,” and “harmonious family.” Through the first two frames, arguments and actions are shored up by principles of equality between women and men (in marital relations, for instance). Another case is rights discourse where women's access to justice is central. For example, in matters related to divorce or domestic violence where the state is the primary regulator through the penal code, family courts, and public agencies that force men to pay alimony to their children (221).
Evrard notes a new phase in the Moroccan women's rights movement. Equality and human rights frames were prominent before the Mudawwana was legislated. After it passed, some women's associations toned down their defense of women's individual rights, putting emphasis instead on women as family members where “strong families depend on strong women.” (249). The third frame highlights equality and reform as means to bettering women's position within the family, rather than improving women's legal autonomy on an individual basis (241).
Evrard's analysis is at its best when she recounts informed observations. For example, she describes interactions at a training session between women activists who represented almost all political parties as one of profound friendliness and sharing until the final night, where amicability ended when party lines were redrawn (254 – 256). At another site, Evrard lets us peep through the keyhole of a girls’ orphanage while an association is holding a session on the issue of inequality as part of its awareness program on discrimination. Unannounced, the director of the orphanage and two well-dressed women enter the room. While the director yells at the girls for not placing their shoes properly outside the door, the two visiting women's glances and body language signal disdain at the sight of the girls and the classroom. When the visitors leave, the girls burst out in laughter, one of them pointing out: “There is your inequality between rich and poor!” (150). In another experience, Evrard cleverly points out tensions inherent in the women's rights movement, through a story set in a café training site for an association devoted to supporting young unwed mothers while providing childcare. Where supporters push for autonomous female legal rights, the young mothers’ dream, they tell her, is to marry and settle down happily ever after (235).
Given that the Mudawwana is the centerpiece around which women's activities evolve, I found it disturbing that legal aspects of the family law before it was reformed, particularly with regards to differences between men's and women's status and rights, were not highlighted in the first sections of the book. Althought the introduction consists of forty-nine pages, the reader has to wait until page 176 to come to find detailed information about the legal aspects of women and the law in Morocco. Also, as an ethnographic documenter of a politicized period in Morocco's modern history, Evrard is too discreet in protecting the identity of some of her informers who are clearly public personalities, such as “Madame” (232). Who is, for instance, “one long-time activist” who says “I never joined any political party. Women's issues were never really in the political parties; they were always last, and it was always ‘women and children’, never the woman as her own person.” (119)? This woman has experienced the Arab–Israeli War of 1967, the rise of the left in Morocco, and is now working on the issue of violence against women. Her testimony is significant for historical, not only ethnographic purposes.
A decade has passed since Evrard conducted the bulk of her field study; the 2011 uprisings continue to take their toll throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and the 2004 Mudawwana reform remains the most paradigmatic postcolonial legal change that equalized women's and men's de jure civic rights in the Arab world since Tunisia's codification of family law in 1956. As such, Evrard's study provides not only empirical and analytical observations on how women participated in pressuring for legal change in Morocco. Her book contributes to understanding politics as something that occurs outside the framework of political parties and electoral channels.
Morocco and Tunisia are two rare states in MENA where the position of women feeds into, perhaps even conditions, processes of democratization in different ways. The governance strategies of an ambitious king eager to consolidate his rule through state feminism (e.g., development plans, and the containment of Islamist political forces) or market feminism (economic liberalization, “civilizational” rural programs, and microcredit schemes)—depending on how you look at it—are evident in Morocco. Less clear is how women's associations that support legal reform act, adapt, and respond to varied state-initiated policies, poverty alleviation plans, and societal conservativism within monarchical rule. Evrard's book fills this gap well.
